Sunday, November 22, 2009

Linnea knocked this collage together this morning to make me feel better. There are a few more, but she spent over 20 minutes on this one so it's the most impressive to my mind. I must work out how to solve the problem of her needing an adult to help find the end of the tape. Better tape?

Thursday, November 12, 2009

This is the hole that Emer cut. I drew around a toilet roll insert, then, without my guidance, she put the picture on top of a piece of playdough, stabbed a hole in it, and cut from the hole as close to the lines as she dared.

I know someone who can read, Nea, Nea,I know someone who can read, oh, Linnea love!

Linnea has been wanting to be able to read (as distinct from wanting to learn to read) for some time. But nothing I did to help her seemed to help. Then I discovered the pleasant but unchallenging Peter and Jane ladybird books and she was much less reluctant. Now we are doing a little bit day by day and she is definitely getting it.

She feels badly when she can't do it, when she isn't completely certain that she knows a word. She whispers them, or says them without breath in her voice so the word is inaudible. But as she gains confidence, using these books where she doesn't care about the story or what the book actually has to say, she is delighted with herself.

It is also possible that my good opinion no longer counts for nothing, but I'm reserving judgment on that; that really would be a sea-change.

But my first born daughter has discovered that her ability to read is a skill she can hone and improve, and she's taking pride in it.

Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Most of the advice says one should give children interesting texts to learn from, thing which are worth reading. This was entirely the wrong tactic with my daughter - it raised the stakes too high. She'd like to practice on books she doesn't otherwise care about, books without story or plot, which are no more interesting the first time than the fiftieth.

Enter "Peter and Jane."

I quite like Peter and Jane. They don't ask much, they have a fairish balance of usually-gendered activities, there's a black-skinned baby doll, they seem like real children.

Sunday, October 04, 2009

The other day, my eldest daughter, who usually doesn't want anything at all, ever, handed me Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach and asked me to read it. We read the first thirteen chapters non-stop.

She was devastated, but didn't want me to stop. The protagonist's parents died when he was four (essential starting point for all children's literature, getting rid of the parents) and her face froze up a bit. Then the aunts were cruel to him and she cried. Eventually she couldn't speak or finish eating her banana and tears ran down her face and I had my arms around her as I read, but she didn't want me to stop and so I continued.

We reached the point where he's inside the peach and realises that he's now in the company of friends, and that's where we stopped.

Later, she asked, "It's not true, is it?"

She didn't mean the talking insects. She meant the cruelty.Since then she has refused to let me read the book, even now all the scary parts are over and it's just the nice parts. She's very very thoughtful on the topic of aunts (she has five lovely aunts and a several very nice great-aunts too).

I'm going to suggest we all watch the DVD tomorrow, instead. It can't possibly be as scary as what happened inside her head when I read the book to her, and it might help reframe it all in a more digestible way, so that we can finish reading the book and move on.Some children like Dr Who. She is afraid that he is lonely, and doesn't like to look at the monster masks in Waterstone's bookshop. Actual moments of peril just about finish her off.

And television violence upsets her, too.

I wonder sometimes whether I should try to desensitise her, but I don't think so, really; I think I should, at this stage, protect her. She does ok now with promises that the hero of the piece really will be ok in the end. But she hates seeing headlice washed down the plughole, because they might get lost in the dark down there.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

The Oyster has been immersed in two things lately: (1) maths, and (2) writing books. I want to note down some of this stuff before I forget it, because it's cool.

Maths

Following on from this post, the 1 2 3 5 4 thing sorted itself out pretty quickly (without intervention, incidentally). The synaesthesia receded in importance, and the Numberjacks mania played itself out. So, thankfully, did the bit with me writing out pages full of numbers for the Oyster to colour in. He occasionally does that himself these days. Sometimes he just does the multiples of 11, because he likes them. He went through a brief phase of writing out the times table (or as he put it, a row of "counting in ones", a row of "counting in twos", a row of "counting in threes", and so on), but that petered out fairly quickly. He knows most of the products up to around 100, I think.

He spent a week or two as an infinity denier. At first he decided that the highest number was called Niall (love that!), and that Niall plus 1 was 0. I think he now gets that you can never stop counting. He's interested in very large numbers. He likes billions and trillions and quadrillions and bazillions. I like the way that even though a bazillion doesn't exist, we can still make statements about it (e.g. it's even, it's a multiple of 10, it's a positive integer greater than a trillion, it's 1 followed by a multiple of 3 zeroes, and so on).

He knows that there are numbers between the integers, but we haven't really got into how that works yet.

He's reasonably solid on place value, as far as I can tell. Sometimes he writes out columns of numbers where column 1 is the numbers from 1 to 9, column 2 is 10 20 30 ... 90, column 3 is 100 200 300 ... 900, and so on. Sometimes we multiply numbers by 2 until we exhaust first his capacity, then mine (to do it without stopping to concentrate or write it down, I mean), then my calculator's (to display the result without resorting to scientific notation). He really likes asking me sums, or having a repeated joke such as "What's 55 plus 55 - is it tenty-ten? *giggle*"

Did you know that if x squared is y, then (x + 1) squared is y + 2x + 1? (For example, 6 squared is 36, and 7 squared is 36 + 12 + 1.) I didn't, until the Oyster got me doing squares in my head (while driving - not recommended!) up to 30 or so.

He has the hang of the number line, and can add and subtract small positive and negative numbers fairly easily, particularly if he has a number line in front of him. His mental arithmetic above 0 is pretty good. "What's 54 plus 35 ... is it 89?" he'll say, or "Is 88 plus 88 176?" Béar Eile (his special bear) turned 107 at the weekend, and he accurately added up the ages of all the humans in the house, then had a reasonable stab at calculating the difference between that number (75, for those following along at home) and 107.

Today's little nugget was when he was counting a page full of pictures, and he counted across the first row of twelve, began to count the second row, then checked himself and counted the number of rows instead. "Four twelves, what's that? Is it 48?"

He has some grasp of bases other than 10. When he was talking to Niall about them, he observed that for base 5, you only need the numbers 0 to 4 to write any number. When the Erisian was visiting, he taught the Oyster about binary - and showed him how to count to 31 on the fingers of one hand. I'm not sure how much of that stayed in, but he appeared to grasp it - and at least when he encounters it again it'll be familiar.

It was also while the Erisian was here that the Oyster asked, "Do all the twelve numbers do that thing where ... like, 1 plus 1 is 2, and 1 2 is 12; 2 plus 2 is 4, and 2 4 is 24?" Turns out they do, as long as you put the original number in the tens column and add it to whatever's there (e.g. 5 plus 5 is 10, and (5+1) 0 is 60; 6 plus 6 is 12, and (6 + 1) 2 is 72). Not sure how far up that goes. But we were very tickled that he'd noticed.

My parents got him a 1st class maths book as a present. He takes it out a couple of times a week and does a few pages of exercises. He's done them easily, so far, once I've read the instructions to him. Mostly, what confuses him is the part about being required to demonstrate how he's getting his answers. The first module dealt exclusively with addition of two numbers with an answer of 10 or less. A few pages later, there were sums with an answer of 11 or 12. Later still, the sums had answers of 13 or 14. He's now even done some where you add more than two numbers. He flipped to the middle of the book and found sums demonstrating place value with columns of dots, and sums to calculate how much change you'd have from 10 cents if you bought an item with a given price.

If he were in school, this would be the book for his third year. To me, this seems generally supportive of our hypothesis that being home-educated is unlikely to lead to academic disadvantage for our children. Actually, what I love about the Oyster's engagement with maths is that from my perspective, it seems that he's Doing Numbers in exactly the same way that he Did Trains a while ago, or Did Robin Hood earlier this year. He's following what fascinates him, in other words, which is the key idea. It's kind of thrilling to see it in action.

Books

There is rather less to say about books, other than that the Oyster is an enviably prolific author. He has written books about Robin Hood, books about dragons, books about trains, monsters, aliens, dinosaurs, knights, numbers. He has written books in A4 and A5 size (stapled by patient relatives, often with several stapled booklets taped together); he has written tiny little books in A7 size (painstakingly assembled by me - so far, a 100-pager and a 256-pager, with cardboard covers).

By "written", I mean that generally he draws the pictures first, then asks for the spellings to write the words (which often go in speech bubbles). Recently, he has been asking only for the words he doesn't know - he can do "the", "and", "of", "book", among others, without assistance. Also, I've adopted the strategy of writing out the phrase he wants on a scrap piece of paper for him to copy, which is less hair-tearingly tedious than calling out the letters in batches of three or four.

Before beginning to write, however, the srs bsns of putting the book together must be completed. Page numbers are very important. So are front and back covers, end-papers, and the contents page. Recently he started adding barcodes (complete with little numbers written along the top), prices, blurbs, and endorsement quotes. Some of his books have had an index.

Today's titles, as a snapshot: Elementary Trains (a present for K), Spaceman George (not sure that one went very far before being abandoned), a recipe book called Oisín's Food, and a two-part series: The Story of the Skull and Further Adventures of the Skull. These latter two were for the Boy Down the Road, who is ... ah ... very traditionally socialised, and likes weapons and fighting and horror-type stuff (but is nonetheless more or less a sweetheart). The Oyster fits his material to his readership, in other words, which I find very interesting.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

I've been asked this more and more lately, and it comes hard on the heels of the many many entries in other people's blogs about why they chose home ed.

I find it kind of hard to answer.

On some levels, home education is a default for me, it's the no-choice no-decision option, much like school is for most people (which school might be a decision, but not whether school). It started to make visceral sense to me when I was about six.

However, when we were looking for somewhere to live, somewhere with a wide choice of schools was important, and somewhere with fairly decent schools and similar institutions, too - not stellar, necessarily, because things change and anyway parental involvement matters more than the school's position on a league table, but ok. We didn't hunt for schools and then look for houses, but we dismissed houses which weren't within easy walking distance of schools.

Because along with assuming that home education would suit me and my family best, I also assumed that I'd have to send my children, when I had them, to school. Just because people have to.

But I don't! Aren't I lucky?

And why not school? I just really don't see that it would, at present, benefit my children in any way. I have a bunch of philosophical objections to the way school as a system is set up and run, but it's still obvious that that system does benefit many adults and children for a wide variety of reasons. Just I can't see a benefit to us yet, and the benefits of what we do are blazingly obvious to me.

I also think that one of my children would be, at this stage in her life, actually damaged by almost all the school set-ups I've seen, and certainly all the ones I've seen as economically available to us. That might change; I expect as she grows older her round peggishness will gradually grow to meet school's square holishness, such that she could fit in there ok even if it didn't benefit her.

I'm glad schools are there, for those as needs 'em, because one day that might include me and mine, and it certainly includes a lot of my nearest and dearest.

Sometimes I'd like to ask them why they chose school. But it's really really rude to do so, so I don't.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Monday, September 07, 2009

Yesterday Linnea was asked what's her favourite story, and she said "The one about the animals and the man makes a boat and the flood." And the other week I was talking to a friend about the cultural references children like ours just won't have to the same extent - we're making no effort to raise Christian or Catholic children, either at home or by sending them to schools where everyone does First Holy Communion and Confirmation and all the rest.

But I think some familiarity with the stories would be a good idea. As a child I had access to a set of American books which were wonderful; they were published by Scholastic and each one had a simple illustrated bible story in it. There were a hundred or so, I think - books a few mm thick taking up a whole shelf. I wonder whether or how I could find such a thing now?

Friday, September 04, 2009

I recently found and printed off a bunch of stuff from the CIMT's Mathematics Enhancement Programme (Primary Extension). I have no idea what's supposed to be "innovative" about it, but the children enjoy it (Linnea, who is five, tries to actually do the exercises and Emer, who is three, colours things in and cuts them out, but they both have the same print-outs, so they're happy).

Linnea likes it except for not feeling confident to read the instructions unless she's alone, and not feeling confident to do the exercises unless I say "that looks right to me, what do you think?" a lot. On the other hand, it does mean she's letting me be involved in something, which is fabulous for me. And mainly she's working through things she finds very easy usually, but doing them slowly and self-critically, with an element of checking-her-work she hasn't usually shown me.

Along with a recent tendency to do things for reward, which she never used to accept, I wonder whether she's reached a stage where she's willing to perform a bit? I mean, willing to do things explicitly knowing there's praise or not-praise at the end of it? That's a big leap for her, and I'm not sure how I feel about it.

Meanwhile, she likes and = very much but would like to introduce V and a sort of bar-less A for other values, like "kind of the same" and "not actually more but bigger anyway."

Saturday, August 29, 2009

One of the hardest things for me is that my gregarious, people-focussed, chatty, sociable, insanely friendly five-year-old leads a rich and private inner life.

And doesn't let me in.

She asks for a little - a very little - and then goes away after I've shown her how to count on her fingers and comes back casually doing multiplication months later, not having mentioned a number in the intervening period.

She swears she can't read but has been overheard doing so often and oft, though never by me. She doesn't do it when I'm around at all, except for pointing out the library's Archaeology dept. She has very rarely and occasionally allowed me to help her with phonics or letter-formation but still I find scraps of writing lying around and am left to glean what stage she's at from that.

And what do I do? I read around her, to her little sister. I leave alphabet friezes and cuisenaire rods lying around, and sometimes play with them with her. I ask her to sign cards and pictures and letters, and sometimes she also writes the recipients name on them. I call on her big-sister role to show the three-year-old things. For whom do I do these things? For myself, because not knowing what's going on in side her head terrifies and saddens me.

But I remember it. And recently she has been a little more forthcoming, perhaps, just a smidge. She talks about her pictures (I must photograph her recent elephant) and we had a little -at words chat this morning. She's been drawing mazes for her sister to solve; through their relationship I can see a lot of her inner life, really, I suppose.

But she's really a very private person. And an enthusiastic nudist. I'm often bewildered.

Sunday, July 12, 2009

It's wall-to-wall numbers at the moment. I don't know how many sets of Numberjacks I've cut out of paper in the last week. (For the uninitiated, the CBeebies show Numberjacks is about superheroes who are also numbers and solve maths-related problems.)

The Oyster is learning to count to 100. He frequently wants the numbers from 1 to 100 written out on a page, with circles around them, so he can colour in the circles. He usually does each column in a single colour, and I think he's working out various patterns.

He does like to go 1 2 3 5 4, 10 20 30 50 40, and so on, mind you. But he acknowledges that this is a personal quirk, and that he's simply choosing different labels to apply to the relevant quantities.

Have I ever mentioned "flower-1"? It's a very handy concept: a shortcut number that encompasses everything from 101 to 2000. So if you use it you can quite easily count up to, say, 2004, the year of the Oyster's birth. It's written with a flower (including stem and vase) and the number 1.

This activity all reminds me very much of the bit in John Holt's How Children Fail (or was it in ...Learn? - my copies are lent so I can't check), where he sits in his classroom with a roll of receipt paper and starts writing down the numbers in order, and the kids are dancing around in excitement and calling each other over to look - "Here's 88! Here's 129! Look - he's going to write 300 next!" - the simple fact of numerical progression being a new and exciting idea to some of them.

Sunday, July 05, 2009

We've discussed it, and if the LA want to interview a child of ours alone, and the child doesn't want to, we will refuse. And as long as refusal seems to be the best thing for the child, we will continue to refuse.

If I believed that the solo interviews would be the best thing for any child, I would feel differently. I will do things which are very slightly harmful to my child for the sake of enormous greater good - like not attending playgroups when contagious, or getting vaccinations when my child is strong enough to withstand the illness should it arise, and so on. But I won't do things which are slightly harmful when there is no purpose to serve other than my personal convenience in avoiding a confrontation.

This is a fairly big deal for us - we're not boat-rockers, for all our activity in activist circles - but it's one of the few parental things where we are totally on the same page instinctively from the word go. And we've decided.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

A photo taken by Linnea:The red light on the washing machine.A photo taken by Ailbhe:Linnea's waiting-for-supper drawing of a fairytale castle on a hill, with three turrets, a prison underneath which is very dark and bad, and an underground tunnel. The slightly alarming fairy has butterfly wings.

Sunday, June 21, 2009

I tried hard to be reasonable and calm, going through the Recommendations one by one. But I don't feel in the least little bit reasonable or calm. My most strongly felt objections, on an emotional level, are in two parts.

Education

The entire document is based on an assumption that education happens basically one way, though there's some variation on detail. It's based on teacher-led school-style pre-planned education. It's based on the assumption that goals and targets and developmental norms are useful to everyone, and that plans and set goals are reasonable things to ask all parents and all children to create, believe in, and work with.

If I thought school-style education would be good for my children, I would send them to school They are both perfectly happy without me. They thrive in large groups of children and demand vast amounts of social interaction from their peers (though we have a broader definition of peers then the school system does, since we don't restrict as narrowly by age as they do). I have no reason to believe that they would be bullied much or be unable to handle complicated social situations. They already do, often.

The document, and its recommendations, and the LA systems and the School Attendance Orders and the criminal prosecutions which may follow, all ignore the concept of Autonomous Education entirely.

And I read on the BBC News website that Mr Badman (Mummy, make the bad man go away) claims that

But he said parents would be judged against their education plans.

"This is not some woolly statement," he said.

"They will be judged on their plans. These statements should contain some milestones for children to achieve," he went on.

"For example by the age of eight, I think they should be autonomous learners, able to read.

"I'm calling for further work to be done, but also setting some parameters."

What is so magical about the age of eight? I know several people who could read early who went on to be extremely bright, or perfectly average, or so uninterested in the education on offer at school that they dropped out completely. I also know several people who read much later - including some who were as old as 9 or 10 before they could read with any fluency at all - who grew up into perfectly normal people with entirely functional lives and, in some cases, well-paid secure jobs which are oddly not disappearing into the waters of the recession.

Why is reading the same as learning autonomously, to this man? They are so clearly not the same to me, who loves reading and has lived on the inside of books for most of the past 25 years since I was one of those early fluent readers, that it seems entirely absurd. Why isn't it more important that an eight-year-old be able to plan a meal, go to the shops with twenty quid, buy groceries based on brand-recognition or single-word recognition, and prepare and cook a meal? Or knit a jumper, or plant, tend, and harvest a plot of vegetables? Eventually either it will become obvious that reading isn't necessary to the things this person wants to do, or they will put the effort in to becoming fluent readers, or they will figure out some other way around the problem.

That goal is just an easier way to measure from outside whether parents are providing the opportunity to learn to read, and that's not good enough. It doesn't measure the actual availability of the opportunity to learn autonomously from their reading, and it certainly doesn't measure whether the education provided for the child is "suitable to his age ability and aptitude and to any special needs he may have". It's perfectly possible to teach a child to read and not to question authority at the same time.

Child protection and rescue

I am absolutely in favour of children being protected, by the state, from abuse, and when protection fails, I am in favour of their being rescued. And that's one reason I am incensed by the idea of a register and an annual visit in the name of "Safeguarding." The numbers of adults I know who grew up in abusive homes - including barely-adults, aged 17 or 18, through the system very recently - and escaped, sometimes taking their younger siblings into their charge, without once having aroused the suspicion of their teachers or neighbours, is terrifying and tragic. It is abundantly obvious to me that relying on daily interaction with teachers to detect abuse is hugely inadequate, and annual visits can only be more so.

But given that they are already reducing the Health Visitor service for the under-fives, the most at-risk group, seriously injured and killed by their parents more than any other age group, I see no hope at all that they will increase the services available to children older than that. I heard somewhere that Education Officers (the title was from someone's memory so may be inaccurate) used to visit children of school age, taking over from Health Visitors, visiting more often when the child is younger and less and less as they grow older, tapering off gradually. They visited homes whether or not children were at school, offering advice on education and development stuff. I think it wasn't available everywhere, perhaps only in London, but it seems obvious to me that this service could help so many children, if adequately funded...

And as for a register, well, it will be lovely to find it on a bus or in a taxi somewhere, like the Child Benefit data, with everyone's names, parents' names, birthdays, and addresses. That will be great.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Recommendation 26This comes at the very end of section 8, "Safeguarding."

DCSF should explore the potential for Centre for Excellence and Outcomes in Children and Young People’s Services (C4EO) and other organisations, to identify and disseminate good practice regarding support for home education.

We should work out how to work out how to tell what we're doing and whether it's any good. And if it is we should make sure we're all doing it. Quite.

Recommendation 27This also comes at the very end of section 8.

It is recommended that the Children’s Workforce Development Council and the National Safeguarding Delivery Unit include the needs of this group of officers in their consideration of national training needs.

We have to train these people, and in any other situation youse guys would be the ones to find it in your budgets and resource management plans, so here you go.

If it happens, someone has to make it happen.

Recommendation 28This comes at the end of section 9, "Resources."

That the DCSF and the Local Government Association determine within three months how to provide to local authorities sufficient resources to secure the recommendations in this report.

The taxpayer, including home educating families, pays for all this stuff for schooled children, and therefore should pay it for home educated children, too, so we need to sort that out! I approve of this, at least. Perhaps they can take the money from, er...

Recommendation 21This comes in section 8, "Safeguarding," after 8.11 - in 8.3 and 8.4 he says " The view was also expressed that attendance at school was no guarantee of a child’s safety, as other tragic cases have indicated. 8.4 I understand the argument but do not accept it in its entirety in that attendance at school brings other eyes to bear, and does provide opportunity for the child to disclose to a trusted adult."

That the Children’s Trust Board ensures that the Local Safeguarding Children Board (LSCB) reports to them on an annual basis with regard to the safeguarding provision and actions taken in relation to home educated children. This report shall also be sent to the National Safeguarding Delivery Unit. Such information should be categorised thereby avoiding current speculation with regard to the prevalence of child protection concerns amongst home educated children which may well be exaggerated. This information should contribute to and be contained within the National Annual Report.

In other words, he knows that school does not keep children safe from abuse at home, but feels that it ought to because there are other people seeing the child, even though it has been repeatedly shown that it doesn't, but common sense says it must. Surely.

But just in case, perhaps we ought to monitor things in case we're wrong about Home Educated children being more vulnerable.

I actually approve of that last bit, where he acknowledges that the value of your shares may go up as well as down actually home educated children may be no more abused than any other section of the underage population.

Recommendation 22This comes after 8.12, where he says "First, on the basis of local authority evidence and case studies presented, even acknowledging the variation between authorities, the number of children known to children’s social care in some local authorities is disproportionately high relative to the size of their home educating population." and " So saying is not to suggest that there is a causal or determining relationship, but simply an indication of the need for appropriately trained and knowledgeable personnel."

That those responsible for monitoring and supporting home education, or commissioned so to do, are suitably qualified and experienced to discharge their duties and responsibilities set out in Working Together to Safeguard Children to refer to social care services children who they believe to be in need of services or where there is reasonable cause to suspect that a child is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm.

I have no idea what he means by the "disproportionate" mentioned, because he doesn't say that there's a correlation at all (which might be quite clever of him, if there isn't one, but is pretty stupid if there is) but I definitely agree that anyone involved needs to be very seriously trained. Rather better than most social workers, in fact, who at least are visiting families more often than annually, when trying to spot and help prevent abuse.

Recommendation 23This follows directly from Recommendation 22 and is mentioned in the Conclusion - "To that end, I urge the DCSF to respond to recommendations 1, 7, 23 and 24 as summarised in the next chapter, at the next available opportunity.".

That local authority adult services and other agencies be required to inform those charged with the monitoring and support of home education of any properly evidenced concerns that they have of parents’ or carers’ ability to provide a suitable education irrespective of whether or not they are known to children’s social care, on such grounds as

alcohol or drug abuse

incidents of domestic violence

previous offences against children

And in addition:

anything else which may affect their ability to provide a suitable and efficient education

This requirement should be considered in the Government’s revision of Working Together to Safeguard Children Guidance.

If they think a child is at risk, they should report it, whether or not the parents are among Those People, defined as alcohol or drug abusers, victims or perpetrators of domestic violence, child abusers, or loads of other people who aren't fit to educate children, use your own judgment, but possibly including gay, poly, on medication for mental or emotional illnesses (even if those illnesses are currently controlled), too poor, or speaking something other than English as a first language. I am not at all sure that children in bilingual homes will be treated any better by home education monitoring than they are by teachers in schools, either.

Recommendation 24This comes after 8.13 and is also mentioned in the Conclusion (see above).

That the DCSF make such change as is necessary to the legislative framework to enable local authorities to refuse registration on safeguarding grounds. In addition local authorities should have the right to revoke registration should safeguarding concerns become apparent.

We need to be able to deny parents the right to home educate if we suspect they are abusing their children... because children who are not safe in their own homes will be safer if 30 of their 168 hours a week are spent in a school, because schools make children safe, QED. But there's no mention of doing anything else to keep these children safe, in the 138 hours a week they are not in school, nor why those measures would be inadequate to cover the 30 hours.

Recommendation 25This comes after 8.14, in which he says "I can find no evidence that elective home education is a particular factor in the removal of children to forced marriage,servitude or trafficking or for inappropriate abusive activities. Based on the limited evidence available, this view is supported by the Association of Chief Police Officers." and 8.15, where he says "had there been different regulations in place as proposed, they may well have had a mitigating effect without necessarily guaranteeing prevention. However, any regulation is only as effective as its transaction. To that end I believe it is important to hold local authorities to account".

That the DCSF, in its revision of the National Indicator Set indicated in its response to the recent Laming Review, should incorporate an appropriate target relating to the safeguarding of children in elective home education.

Part one: There isn't any evidence that we can see, so we're safe to say that more regulation might well have reduced abuse from a number we can't see to a smaller number we can't see. Part two: Local Authorities need to be monitored too, so let's have some targets.

What kind of targets? A reduction in numbers of abused home educated children, from a number we don't know to a smaller number? Or an increase, from a number we don't know to a much larger number? A target for a percentage of home educated children on the lists to achieve certain things by certain times? A cross-referencing system against the child's medical records to see if they're on antidepressants or getting antibiotics too often? What???

I'd have an opinion on this if I had any idea what kind of targets he's talking about. It might be obvious to someone who shares his biases or assumptions, but I don't seem to, and it's really not clear to me.

These all come in section 7, "Special Educational Needs."Recommendation 17

That the Ofsted review of SEN provision give due consideration to home educated children with special educational needs and make specific reference to the support of those children.

If the LA are going to have a duty of care of some sort towards home educated children, then children with Special Educational Needs certainly shouldn't be left out! This is consistent, at least. I don't know whether it would be useful to families with SEN children.

Recommendation 18

That the DCSF should reinforce in guidance to local authorities the requirement to exercise their statutory duty to assure themselves that education is suitable and meets the child’s special educational needs. They should regard the move to home education as a trigger to conduct a review and satisfy themselves that the potentially changed complexity of education provided at home, still constitutes a suitable education. The statement should then be revised accordingly to set out that the parent has made their own arrangements under section 7 of the Education Act 1996.

In the wake of the Ofsted review, changes to the SEN framework and legislation may be required.

I'd like to read this as anything other than "They should assume that parents who believe school has been shown to be inadequate for their children's needs are actually incompetents (at best) who don't know their own children and need to be checked up on." But that reading leaps out at me.

Recommendation 19

That the statutory review of statements of SEN in accord with Recommendation 18 above be considered as fulfilling the function of mandatory annual review of elective home education recommended previously.

OK, so they don't want SEN home educators to jump through both sets of hoops; that seems reasonable enough.

Recommendation 20

When a child or young person without a statement of special educational needs has been in receipt of School Action Plus support, local authorities and other agencies should give due consideration to whether that support should continue once the child is educated at home – irrespective of whether or not such consideration requires a new commissioning of service.

I don't know enough about the School Action Plus scheme - it's a school thing, but I don't know whether it's something likely to be useful or intrusive. If this bit is about the LA continuing to support families with access to resources and guidance after they find school inadequate or damaging and remove their children, that might be quite good. But that's a very charitable interpretation and not actually backed up by the stories I've heard.

Recommendation 13This comes in section 5, "The Current and Future Role of Local Authorities and Children’s Trusts," after 5.9

That local authority provision in regard to elective home education is brought into the scope of Ofsted’s assessment of children’s services within the Comprehensive Area Assessment through information included in the National Indicator Set (Recommendation 25), the annual LSCB report (Recommendation 21) and any other relevant information available to inspectors.

If the LAs are supposed to be providing services, then yes, they need to be held accountable for it, like every other service they are supposed to provide.

Recommendation 14This comes in section 6, "The Number of Electively Home Educated Children," after 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3, in which he says "Our own data concurred with the DfES (2007) report, that there are around 20,000 children and young people currently registered with local authorities. We know that to be an underestimate and agree it is likely to be double that figure, if not more, possibly up to 80,000 children."

That the DCSF require all local authorities to make an annual return to the Children’s Trust Board regarding the number of electively home educated children and young people and the number of School Attendance Orders and Education Supervision Orders as defined in the 1996 Education Act, issued to home educated children and young people.

I'd have thought that at least one year's worth of this data - preferably more - would be necessary to conduct this review in the first place. I assume School Attendance Orders are recorded and the reason for issuing them is part of the data somewhere. Why isn't this already in the report? Surely the change between pre-registration-and-support and post-registration-and-support by the state is what's important? Unless the goal is to show how abusive and useless home education is, rather than how valuable the state's assistance is and how much better things are with local authority services?

Recommendation 15This comes after 6.4

That the DCSF take such action as necessary to prevent schools or local authorities advising parents to consider home education to prevent permanent exclusion or using such a mechanism to deal with educational or behavioural issues.

Well, quite. "We can't cope, so you'll have to home educate" is a bit... handwashy. And it didn't oughter be allowed. Good.

Recommendation 16This comes after 6.5

That the DCSF bring forward proposals to give local authorities power of direction with regard to school places for children and young people returning to school from home education above planned admission limits in circumstances where it is quite clear that the needs of the child or young person could not be met without this direction.

If a child needs a school place they ought to get one, regardless of what parental error led to the need being inconvenient for the authorities. Good. Though some schools are already more overcrowded than others, so this might be a real hardship in some places.

Recommendation 12This comes in section 5, "The Current and Future Role of Local Authorities and Children’s Trusts," after 5.8

BECTA considers the needs of the home educating community in the national roll out of the home access initiative

Becta is "the government agency leading the national drive to ensure the effective and innovative use of technology throughout learning." It used to stand for British Educational Communications and Technology Agency but so many people knew who they were that they dropped the acronym and use the name independently of it. Hm. They say "Our work cuts across a wide range of priority areas and key themes. These include enabling people to have equal opportunity and access to learning resources, creating links between schools and the home, ensuring the safety of all learners, personalising learning to enable learners and practitioners to interact and inspire each other, helping providers to plan effective investment in technology in building or refurbishment work, and using technology to ensure efficiency and value for money."

I don't know what "considers the needs" means.

That local authorities consider what support and access to ICT facilities could be given to home educating children and young people through the existing school networks and the use of school based materials

Does this go beyond people using the internet access in their local library? Perhaps home educators will have access to super sekrit educationalists web resources? That would be good - the easily accessible free public resources are so extensive I can't imagine what might be beyond them, but we haven't really felt the need to look yet.

That the QCA should consider the use of ICT in the testing and exam process with regard to its impact on home educated children and young

Young what? I assume it means young people; another proofreading error, or something. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority should consider (not sure what is meant by consider) that ICT could make things more accessible? Less so, because of homes without computer access? Not sure. In the review itself he says "This could be a report in itself but suffice it to say that the importance of ICT in learning, access to knowledge and information, communication and employment is self evident." which leaves me assuming that the people he's talking to already agree with him, so he doesn't need to provide any real information. Irritating. I can't form an opinion on this because the position stated is too vague to hold an informed opinion on!

That all local authority officers and others engaged in the monitoring and support of elective home education must be suitably trained. This training must include awareness of safeguarding issues and a full understanding of the essential difference, variation and diversity in home education practice, as compared to schools. Wherever possible and appropriate, representatives of the home educating community should be involved in the development and/or provision of such training. It is recommended that all officers be trained in the use of the Common Assessment Framework.

The Common Assessment Framework appears to be a fairly recent thing, too, but for all I know it's very good. At least they want people trained - at the moment the people interacting with home educators on behalf of the local authority might be experts or complete novices, almost at random, it seems.

I like the sound of "a full understanding of the essential difference, variation and diversity in home education practice, as compared to schools" except that a lot of the base assumptions evident throughout the document make it clear that autonomous education is not considered at all. I wouldn't be in the least surprised if academic achievement was the main consideration, in fact.

Recommendation 10This comes after 5.7, which says, among other things, "it seems to me perverse to articulate concern about thousands of young people yet cut them off from services that would be rightfully theirs if they attended school."

That all local authorities should offer a menu of support to home educating families in accord with the requirements placed upon them by the power of wellbeing, extended schools and community engagement and other legislation. To that end local authorities must provide support for home educating children and young people to find appropriate examination centres and provide entries free to all home educated candidates who have demonstrated sufficiently their preparedness through routine monitoring, for aII DCSF funded qualifications.

That all sounds fine - provide and access and menu are not the same as enforce and uptake and instructions.

(I kind of wish they'd used lower case l for the word "all" instead of aII, unless aII is some educational jargon with which neither I nor Google are familiar - am I being ignorant or pedantic here?)

Signpost to third sector support where they have specialist experience and knowledge, for example, provision for bullied children.

All of 11 sounds lovely. If all that stuff was available (not compulsory) it would really benefit children and their families. If it wasn't for some of the other stuff in the recommendations, I'd probably be sitting here clapping my hands in glee. Though I can't see us actually availing of any of it except perhaps the music and post-14 vocational opportunities if the children turn out so inclined. Perhaps labs would be involved? I can see access to labs being helpful for some things.

Recommendation 7This comes in section 5, "The Current and Future Role of Local Authorities and Children’s Trusts," after 5.4, and is mentioned in the Conclusion - "To that end, I urge the DCSF to respond to recommendations 1, 7, 23 and 24 as summarised in the next chapter, at the next available opportunity."

The DCSF should bring forward proposals to change the current regulatory and statutory basis to ensure that in monitoring the efficiency and suitability of elective home education:

That designated local authority officers should:– have the right of access to the home;– have the right to speak with each child alone if deemed appropriate or, if a child is particularly vulnerable or has particular communication needs, in the company of a trusted person who is not the home educator or the parent/carer.

On what planet will a child tell the truth to strangers introduced to them by their abusers, even if they're left alone with the strangers? Maybe if the child is suicidal. But often not even then. How will they get abused children to speak up under such circumstances? What will they do if they do? I'm reminded of my school medical in fifth class. Hah. Or the custody case. How can a child tell the truth when they know the adults are listening?

And then, there are all the people who have happy, cheerful, viciously untidy homes, who may or may not have the confidence to have their children assessed for signs of abuse without stressing for days cleaning up and so on.

In so doing, officers will be able to satisfy themselves that the child is safe and well.

I hope to goodness vulnerable children are being dealt with by more specialist experts than any of this implies. And let's not go into the idea that "well" implies "safe" or vice versa.

That a requirement is placed upon local authorities to secure the monitoring of the effectiveness of elective home education as determined in Recommendation 1.

This seems sensible, again. If the whole thing happens, the LAs have to be required to do it, and to do it properly.

That parents be required to allow the child through exhibition or other means to demonstrate both attainment and progress in accord with the statement of intent lodged at the time of registration.

Setting aside what I think of the statement at the time of registration, I have no idea how anyone can set guidelines for this. My children may or may not choose, at any given time, to demonstrate kindness, emotional maturity, a thorough and inventive knowledge of the various forms of "sudden pinch with the fingernails," some or all of the alphabet, and a dislike of being tested.

Or they might want to show off.

Recommendation 8This comes in section 5, after 5.5, which says "Such new powers will still depend upon, and be more effective, where there are good relationships and mutual trust, respect and open communication between the home educating family and the local authority. The home may well become the place of education but it is first and foremost a home [...]"

That reasonable warning of intended visit and invitation to exhibit should be given to home educators, parents and carers, not less than two weeks in advance. A written report of each visit must be filed within 21 days and copied to the home educating parent and child. A suitable process for factual correction and challenge to the content must be in place and made known to all parties.

That part is sound. If they have to come to the educating home at all (and I don't see why they do, honestly) then it's in the child's best interests for no-one to be completely surprised by it.

But I do not believe that this will protect children who are at risk. I don't see how. Abusers and abused children alike are very skilled, very early on, at hiding abuse. Annual visits from relative strangers won't help.

Recommendation 3This comes in the middle of section 4, "Elective Home Education in Context – the Views of Home Educators and Others."

That all local authorities analyse the reasons why parents or carers chose elective home education and report those findings to the Children’s Trust Board, ensuring that this analysis contributes to the debate that determines the Children and Young People’s Plan.

I think this could be really good and might significantly improve schools if it's done by people with open minds and moderate intelligence. Which it might well be.

Recommendation 4This comes at the end of section 4.

That the local authority should establish a Consultative Forum for home educating parents to secure their views and representative opinion. Such a body could be constituted as a sub-group of the Children’s Trust with a role in supporting the development of the Children’s Trust, and the intentions of the local authority with regard to elective home education.

If any of this - the broader "The Review" recommendations - is going to happen, this part is completely essential.

Recommendation 5 This comes in section 5, "The Current and Future Role of Local Authorities and Children’s Trusts," after 5.2

That the DCSF should bring forward proposals requiring all local authorities to report to the Children’s Trust Board making clear how it intends to monitor and support children and young people being educated at home, in accord with Recommendation 1.

Wait, what have the Children's Trust Board got to do with this? (Not to be confused with The Children's Trust - the CTB was announced as An Initiative (see this BBC article with photos of Baby P) though many local councils seem to have had their own branches or versions of it since 2006 or earlier, according to the results of a quick google).

The part before this, in the main body of the review, had some examples of Lovely Things Certain LAs Do To Make Friends With Home Educators, including offering support, making advice available, facilitating meeting other home educators, all of which incidentally makes it easy to keep an unintrusive eye on the families and the children. I rather approve. I mean, I might not go to such groups, because we have a lot on, but if I lived in an area with less going on all the time, they might be brilliant.

But what the Children's Trust Board are doing in here I do not know.

Recommendation 6This comes in section 5, after 5.3

That local authorities should where appropriate commission the monitoring and support of home education through the local Children’s Trust Board, thereby securing a multidisciplinary approach and the likely use of expertise from other agencies and organisations including the voluntary sector.

... ah, money. Voluntary Sector. Yay. OK, that makes a certain amount of sense. I can't find a clear and consistent explanation of what a CTB is or does, anywhere, but since they were only announced in a few months ago that's not surprising; the wheels grind exceeding slow, after all. They seem to involve an awful lot of branches, so I do hope they've got their interdepartmental communications sorted out.

Recommendation 2This also comes at the end of section 3, "Current Legislation and Regulation."

That the DCSF review the current statutory definition of what constitutes a “suitable” and “efficient” education in the light of the Rose review of the primary curriculum, and other changes to curriculum assessment and definition throughout statutory school age.

Well, if they're going to demand plans and curricula and specific goals and targets, re-evaluating what constitutes suitable and efficient education is something they really, really need to do - and they also need to make sure they're not asking parents to do better than they ask schools to do. But if they're going to demand curricula they are ignoring the educational and emotional needs and philosophical principles of lots of people anyway. People he claims to have taken into account, if you read the body of the review as well as the summary of recommendations.

Such a review should take account of the five Every Child Matters outcomes determined by the 2004 Children Act, should not be overly prescriptive but be sufficiently defined to secure a broad, balanced, relevant and differentiated curriculum that would allow children and young people educated at home to have sufficient information to enable them to expand their talents and make choices about likely careers.

I can't even tell whether they are talking about the needs of three-year-olds or sixteen-year-olds. They're talking about people who have a likely expectation of a career, though, rather than people who just do jobs to earn a living and change what they do to suit themselves. The current economic climate seems to be an odd place to talk about careers, to me.

Though it does perhaps mean that [an eleven-year-old I know] can cease educating himself forthwith since he has sufficient qualifications to teach in his area of expertise, without further training, in several countries. He could be earning his living now but it seems to be illegal for him to do so where he lives.

The outcome of this review should further inform guidance on registration.

This comes at the end of section 3, "Current Legislation and Regulation," and is mentioned in the Conclusion - "To that end, I urge the DCSF to respond to recommendations 1, 7, 23 and 24 as summarised in the next chapter, at the next available opportunity."

That the DCSF establishes a compulsory national registration scheme, locally administered, for all children of statutory school age, who are, or become, electively home educated.

That sounds fine so far.

This scheme should be common to all local authorities.

That makes sense and would do away with the "it's ok in Anytown but constant authoritarian hassle in Otherplace" thing that happens now, if properly administered.

Registration should be renewed annually.

I have no idea why but presumably this would be automated somehow.

Those who are registering for the first time should be visited by the appropriate local authority officer within one month of registration.

To prove what? that the child is still alive? The reason for and format of this visit needs to be made explicit (must try to read main document again). I'm thinking of a family with young children who were repeatedly hassled in the fortnight after the mother died of cancer, here - it turned out to be a bureaucratic mistake and the authorities were very sorry, but it doesn't do much to give one faith in their ability to do these things sensitively and carefully.

Local authorities should ensure that all home educated children and young people already known to them are registered on the new scheme within one month of its inception and visited over the following twelve months, following the commencement of any new legislation.

Register within a month of its inception, and then visit within a month as per previous line or within twelve months, presumably because of staffing issues. I wonder how they'll decide whom to visit when?

Provision should be made to allow registration at a local school, children’s centre or other public building as determined by the local authority.

Allow? Or require? Will families be required to traipse along to some central building and queue up to register? It's later made clear that the information about registration should be available online as well as at specific venues but not whether registration itself can be done otherwise.

When parents are thinking of deregistering their child/children from school to home educate, schools should retain such pupils on roll for a period of 20 school days so that should there be a change in circumstances, the child could be readmitted to the school.

When parents, having considered the matter and decided to deregister their child/children from school, actually formally do so, the school should disregard this for twenty days, making the children legally truant and the parents criminals, in case the parents change their mind. I am not loving this idea.

This period would also allow for the resolution of such difficulties that may have prompted the decision to remove the child from school.

Then there needs to be another list - like "The Not on the roll, but on the Definitely Got A Place Until Such-A-Date List." I mean, the period of reflection is not a bad idea, but if the child is on the roll and is not at school and is not ill and has not been granted special leave of absence by the head teacher, the parents are criminals.

National guidance should be issued on the requirements of registration and be made available online and at appropriate public buildings. Such guidance must include a clear statement of the statutory basis of elective home education and the rights and responsibilities of parents.

This guidance (information) should be available online or by post, surely? I understand that this might mean a print-and-postage cost but parents could be required to pay it. I can phone up and ask for information about my child benefits to be posted to me for nothing, and that's often a fairly hefty booklet.

At the time of registration parents/carers/guardians must provide a clear statement of their educational approach, intent and desired/planned outcomes for the child over the following twelve months.

This is ridiculous. It's not possible for anyone practicing autonomous education, for a start, and it's also inappropriate for a huge number of traumatised, bullied children who are being taken out of school for their emotional and mental wellbeing as well as because of the educational deficiency of the school. Lots of families need six to twelve months to get over the laziness and coasting, self-doubt and refusal, or other manifestations of trauma which even bright children develop. They've ignored deschooling and de-institutionalising entirely, here.

Guidance should be issued to support parents in this task with an opportunity to meet local authority officers to discuss the planned approach to home education and develop the plan before it is finalised. The plan should be finalised within eight weeks of first registration.

Ridiculous. Meeting, fine - or phonecalls; it would be good to get something like "Hi, this is Alex from the LA again, just checking you and little Sam are still ok - have you thought of any questions or anything you need from us since we last spoke?". Plans and structures, no, wholly inappropriate to vast numbers of children and should not be a legal requirement, especially in the very early stages.

As well as written guidance, support should encompass advice from a range of advisers and organisations, including schools. Schools should regard this support as a part of their commitment to extended schooling.

It would be nice to be able to get advice and support from lots of people, yes.

Where a child is removed from a school roll to be home educated, the school must provide to the appropriate officer of the local authority a record of the child’s achievement to date and expected achievement, within 20 school days of the registration, together with any other school records.

Presumably copies of this will go to the parents, too. I don't see how it helps anyone, though, since people removing children from the school system aren't usually doing it because the school system has worked so well for them that they believe the basic assumptions behind it to be invaluable.

Local authorities must ensure that there are mechanisms/systems in place to record and review registrations annually.

The Department for Children, Schools and Families recently published a Review containing 28 Recommendations. The full thing in PDF form is available for download from their website; I'm going to go through the recommendations and jot down my thoughts on them. The quotes I'm responding to are taken from Section 12, Summary of Recommendations.

My response is broken into ten posts, but they refer to each other a little, which is why I'm posting them all at once.OverviewIn general, I found the review internally consistent (the points followed each other logically, without direct internal contradictions), but vague and full of unsupported assumptions - some of which I agreed with, but that's not the point. In particular, I don't see how even one child would be made safer by the proposed registration and monitoring. I can think of several ways which might work better, though I don't see why they are necessary.

It is a cause of concern that although approximately 20,000 home educated children and young people are known to local authorities, estimates vary as to the real number which could be in excess of 80,000. [Section 1.3]

Our own data concurred with the DfES (2007) report, that thereare around 20,000 children and young people currently registered with local authorities. We know that to be an underestimate and agree it is likely to be double that figure, if not more, possibly up to 80,000 children.[Section 6.1]

That is, in a country of about 60 million people, there might be 60 thousand children wholly unknown to the authorities. Hidden. Given that these children are not registered for child benefit, NHS services, family tax credit, passports, or anything else, how on earth will a register of home educators help? And how did the authorities lose track of 60,000 children between their birth and their reaching age 5 (school age)? This seems to me like tabloid scaremongering.

6.2 ContactPoint will record the place where a child is being educated, where that is known, including where a child is being educated at home.

6.3 Registration proposed within this report should complete the picture and offer further evidence of their wellbeing and educational progress.

Why is Contact Point so inadequate? Can't they cross-reference anything? and if they can't, why are they proposing so many different committees, departments, boards and bodies to deal with this? Either inter-departmental communication is something they are good at, in which case most of this new stuff isn't necessary, or it isn't, in which case most of this new stuff will have the same problems the old stuff has.

I find it very hard to believe that the most effective way of spending whatever money is allocated to education, or ensuring children are not being abused at home, or both, is to create an entirely new system based on unavailable evidence, assumptions, unsupported conclusions, and carefully making sure to link home educators and child abusers together in the minds of the general public.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

I'm working on a series of posts about it - mainly just what I think of the recommendations - but it looks like it's going to be eleven posts, so it will be a while.

I'm also really worried about the feedback I'm likely to get on my posts, but I suppose that's something one has to deal with. Anyone I actually know in person will be polite, at least, and assume I am not personally advocating child abuse.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

On Thursday Linnea played with the Cuisenaire rods for an hour and then spotted the Nrich website over my shoulder, usurped my place at the computer, and spent two hours doing puzzles, sometimes with the Cuisenaire rods to help her.

She wouldn't stop. When we made her stop she played her chocolate game instead, which isn't much different, really. In total, she spent about three and a half hours doing sums and logic puzzles with shapes and patterns.

Afterwards she was tired and cranky, but she's also getting her six-year molars, so that's not proof of anything.

On Friday she didn't start until closer to four, so she stopped naturally when her daddy came home at five.

Friday, March 06, 2009

What about the things they teach in school that you can't teach at home?

I've never worked out what these are. What is impossible to teach at home? And why?

What about learning to socialise with large age-sorted groups?

I can't say this is something I think is useful or necessary. In fact, for a lot of people, it's actively harmful, as far as I can see. Learning to socialise within large groups of any kind is a useful skill, and there are lots of places where people can learn to do that. I learned to do it fairly well aged about 25, myself, after unlearning a lot of what school situations taught me was "normal behaviour".

Doesn't anyone check?

Not as much as I do, no, but there are circumstances under which various state-sanctioned individuals or bodies can and do check up on whether one is fulfilling one's legal obligation to provide a child with an education. One could wish they were as rigorous in schools but obviously the sheer numbers make that impossible.

How will you know whether you're covering the whole curriculum?

Whose curriculum, and why would I want to cover it? Many curriculums(a?) are available for free or for sale, so I could just look it up, if I decided that a curriculum was the best thing for my children, or that that was a useful way to guide my own work.

What if you don't want to teach her long division because she'll never use it in real life?

Basic practical skills which are used in real life are kind of automatic. Things which are no useful in real life might be learned for sheer joy of them, and if not, does it really matter?

Linnea will be five soon, and Emer is two and a half. So today's trip to Eclectic Games was more interesting than they were when both children were much younger.

Linnea played with Chocolate Fix and did the first six puzzles quickly enough to surprise the properietor, and Emer played with a Rattlesnake game involving magnets. Magnets are marvellous toys.

I was interested enough by Linnea's concentration on Chocolate Fix that I really want to buy it for her, now. But will I wait and give it as a birthday present, or just get it right now for her immediate gratification?!

They also had a go at learning to use a vending machine, and Linnea condescended to write some letters on a card for me, though they didn't make much sense to me. (AXIA, if anyone is wondering. She really likes an X).

Monday, January 05, 2009

Linnea is four years eight months old now, apparently. I find it hard to believe, myself. Andwhat is she doing?

She's definitely learning to be more conciliating in her interpersonal relationships - children who cry or shout at her are very likely to get their way unless she's totally confident that they will still be her friend tomorrow. She clearly offers compromises and gets upset when they aren't listened to.

Her favourite protest at home is "You are a Gnoring me!" and her favourite insult is "Now you are nuis-less," (also "Don't be so nuis-less.") She's toying with "You're a stinky poo," too, but that's for fun rather than to express unhappiness or frustration.

She's more and more interested in learning to read and write but still not interested in being Taught. Similar with maths - she's adding, subtracting and multiplying single-digit numbers all the time, but doesn't like us initiating a session of it, though we're expected to drop everything and answer "what is seven nines?" at her lightest whim.

I gave her window crayons recently and she drew some lovely stuff on the bay window. I must brave the cold without my gloves and photograph it. It's very bold and confident; there's a house and a snail and a sun and some waves.

She'd like to learn to knit but doesn't like how fiddly and difficult it is. She has short needles and lovely mixed-colours yarn, thanks to Nana, but hasn't stuck it out as far as knitting a whole stitch yet.

Her grasp of anatomy surprises us sometimes - she told us over Christmas that her ribs are the bones which protect her heart and lungs because her heart and lungs are soft and squashy and bones are hard. Presumably that was in a book or on telly but I didn't know she knew it.

I said "I like spending time with you, Linnea," today, and she responded, thoughtfully, "But not when you're cross."